10 Kyats

Burma's first post-independence central banking notes, of which this is part, replaced the Currency Board issues that had carried the country through the immediate postwar years. The Union Bank of Burma was established in 1952, and this 1953 series was its opening statement as a full issuing authority — De La Rue providing the printing credibility that a newly sovereign institution needed before its own infrastructure could support such work.

The watermark on this series is a simple pattern rather than a portrait, a deliberate choice that distanced these notes visually from the colonial-era issues they superseded.